December 17, 2006

A Tale of Two Chairs

ActionOnline has two posts today about wheelchair design, which represent the hard choices facing every handicapped person on a budget.

First there is the Action Chair designed by Randy Kwapis for his son, Matt. It looks like any other chair. What makes it different is a shock absorber that lets it go through grass and over sidewalk cracks easily.

Kwapis designed the chair so his son could play, and it's a great little chair. The company that now sells the chair as the AC-2 is called Mobility Sports, and he's continuing to try to improve it, for example allowing it to fit easily in a car.

The iBot, unlike any other chair on the market, can actually climb stairs and make the user appear to stand (as it's doing in the picture). Kamen brought one out to The Colbert Report and host Stephen Colbert used it to get from behind his desk to his interview set in about 90 seconds.

The problem is the cost -- $26,000. That's just a little more than conventional power chairs cost, Kamen insists, but it's still beyond the reach of most disabled people. Under current rules Medicare would reimburse only $5,300 of that cost. Kamen and others are fighting to get this raised. But there is the practical market to consider, which may be why the picture featured on the iBot Web site shows a young woman using the chair, with what look like proud parents beaming at her.

The problem with disability is it hits rich, poor, and middle class people, but only the wealthiest can really afford to live with disability and have any normal function. If you haven't guessed by now, I consider Kwapis to be the more amazing inventor of the two here.

Finding ways to lower the price of mobility should be a major society goal. There's a chair waiting for all of us, if we live long enough. Let's make it a good one, and one we can afford.

Comments

I agree with your take on this. Finding the practical and appropriate wheelchair can be tough or sometimes near impossible. Funding that find independently, if and when it happens, is almost always impossible. Lowered prices would be nice but this would probably go hand-in-hand with diminished quality. Quality, an issue unto itself.

Obviously neither of you are in a wheelchair. Why would you choose a chair that can go through grass over a chair that can go up stairs? If you are looking for the cheapest alternative, sitting disabled people on the curb would be the cheapest alternative. Here a man has invented a chair that will revolutionize the disabled community and we can't afford it because billions of dollars are going toward funding a war in Iraq. I think it really comes down to priorities.

Obviously neither of you are in a wheelchair. Why would you choose a chair that can go through grass over a chair that can go up stairs? If you are looking for the cheapest alternative, sitting disabled people on the curb would be the cheapest alternative. Here a man has invented a chair that will revolutionize the disabled community and we can't afford it because billions of dollars are going toward funding a war in Iraq. I think it really comes down to priorities.

Why would you choose a chair that can go through grass over a chair that can go up stairs? If you are looking for the cheapest alternative, sitting disabled people on the curb would be the cheapest alternative. Here a man has invented a chair that will revolutionize the disabled community and we can't afford it because billions of dollars are going toward funding a war in Iraq. I think it really comes down to priorities.